Amazon’s Oregon cloud region open for business

Amazon Web Services (s amzn) is making available a new U.S. West region located in Oregon, which it is positioning as a lower-cost alternative to the company’s existing Northern California region. AWS says services in the Oregon region costs about 10 percent less than in Northern California; for Amazon EC2, at least, Oregon costs the same as Amazon’s U.S. East region in Virginia.

According to Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge, Amazon has been building multiple modular data centers in remote areas of Oregon. Prices for AWS offerings out of the Oregon region are likely lower than Northern California because of generally lower energy costs in Oregon and the presence of renewable energy sources such as hydroelectric power.

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In the press release announcing the new region, AWS senior vice president Andy Jassy said, “Launching this new lower-priced U.S. West Region today is another example of our commitment to driving down costs for our customers – now, developers and businesses with operations or end users near the west coast of the United States can use our US West Infrastructure at an even lower cost than they could before.”

The region is also probably good news for customers on the availability front as well as on the cost front. Many AWS customers learned harsh lessons about cloud application architectures during the service’s extended outage in April, including about the importance of setting up disaster recovery plans spanning AWS regions. For customers concerned about availability more than price, the lower cost of the Oregon region might just be icing on the cake.

AWS now runs out of several regions across the globe. Aside from the U.S. regions in Oregon, Northern California and Virginia, AWS has regions in Singapore, Tokyo and Dublin. In August, it launched a region called GovCloud specifically designed to meet U.S. government compliance regulations.

It’s great to see the AWS services now available in the Oregon region. It will serve to expand the AWS scalability and redundancy of services. I’m sure the economic benefits will also be appreciated in the region. For us, it will allow us to over greater regional coverage now that additional availability zones are offered in the Oregon region.

At KingsBride Systems we have successfully leveraged AWS scalability and redundancy services for our SharePoint based disaster recovery and business continuity planning enterprise solution. AWS has allowed us to ensure that our client’s disaster recovery and business continuity plans are securely available when they need them. As plans are updated AWS allows us to distribute them via email and to mobile devices so that all participants have the most current plans describing their roles and responsibilities. We are also working with backup and recovery technology partners to integrate those features directly within our planning tool.

If you are interested you can find out more about how we have leveraged the AWS services at